


still waters

by blood bag boogie (evil_bunny_king)



Series: The Ember Days [5]
Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ember!verse, F/F, F/M, Sweet girlfriends are sweet, decisions made/ remembered, mothers are reckoned with
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/blood%20bag%20boogie
Summary: Otherwise known as: the saga of the boxwine and rabbit blood.
Relationships: Ava du Mortain/Female Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell, Ava du Mortain/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell, Female Detective/Ava du Mortain
Series: The Ember Days [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1936339
Comments: 16
Kudos: 24
Collections: The Ember Days





	1. Date Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters written as part of the detective ask meme/other prompts- the answers spiralled into stories of their own.
> 
> Same verse as by the dying embers, weaving in and out, before and after.

Ava is coming over. Ava is coming over which means it's _date night_ and Dinah, who initiated this, sweet talked the necessary patrol schedule switch-ups, wrangled time in both of their diaries so that they can have this evening just to be together- comes up against a formidable barrier: _dinner plans._

She knows that Ava likes - wine.

She knows nothing she can think to purchase/afford can quite cut it, not after a connoisseurship fine-tuned after a millenia (or as close as). And so _attempting_ to find something suitable feels foolish. A set up for embarrassment, if not failure.

It also feels like a _challenge_.

And she wonders, if all the bottles were unlabelled, would Ava even be able to tell the difference…?

_Wine it is._

_\--_

There’s a small wine bar in the city, by one of the old markets, where her mother took her a week before she left for university. A quiet place for its location, tucked back from the road and the bustle of tourists with an open glass front and spiral staircases and she remembers being ushered in and then down, to a basement filled with candle-lit booths and old polished wood tables. She remembers the way that her mother had smiled at her, proudly and that slight bit sad in the flickering half-light; how it had felt like an ending and a beginning for the first time.

Her mother had asked the waiter for the wine list and then after a long, slow blink she’d asked for their recommendation (Dinah would always admire her, if only for the blank slate of her poker face). They’d eaten (olives, thin slices of cured meats, fresh bread dipped in vinegar and oil) and they’d talked, around the quiet murmur of the room and the warmth of the wine. It’d had been - nice.

They’d made a habit of it. They’d go each year, whenever Dinah drifted back into town: the same basement table, the same candle-light- white wine, sometimes, rather than the red.

A quick Google and the wine bar has a wine cellar, she confirms. Collections only - and so she makes the trip to select a few bottles, ordering charcuterie and cheese from the butchers for delivery on her way back.

The night of, and she and Ava are tucked into her small love-seat of a sofa, a veritable feast of tapas arrayed on her coffee table and glasses of warm, aired wine in hand.

Ava idly tips her glass until the wine slips to the other side of the glass, her gaze unfocused, features soft in the lamplight. She looks- comfortable, at peace. She looks like she belongs in the mess of Dinah’s apartment, and there’s this warm, full feeling brimming in Dinah’s chest - a marvelling at this strange, quiet woman, the ways they fit together. 

Ava’s hand is on her ankle where Dinah’s feet are tucked against her thigh, her thumb gently stroking the skin beneath the cuff of her jeans. 

After a moment, she lets out a thoughtful hum. Dinah turns to look at her, raising a sleepy brow in question and receives a smile in response. “I was just thinking,” she says, lowering the glass to the armrest. “That it’s been a while, since I’ve had such a nice wine. Or such company.” She tilts her head towards her, eyes glittering, a deep green in the light. “Thank you for this, Dinah.”

Dinah smiles back. “You like it, then?” She blows out a dramatic sigh. “You’re a hard woman to shop for, _Agent du Mortain_.”

That smile again. That affection, warm and consuming and the weight of her hand, curled around her foot. “I do, _Detective_. Although I don’t think I recognise it.” 

Dinah blinks, long and slow, and lets her head tip back against the couch.

“I would’ve thought you'd been able to tell.” 

Ava’s gaze flicks to hers, curious, amused.

“Oh?”

Her heartbeat is going to betray her, she knows - there’s already a grin threatening the smooth slate of her composure, curling the corners of her mouth-

“Whether it was the cheap wine or not. You know. A cheap box one from Aldi.” She shifts in her seat to face Ava properly, the grin cracking past her control as a look of confusion and then slight consternation crosses Ava’s features. She turns to look back at her glass of wine. She raises it up into the light again, peering at it accusingly.

“You see,” Dinah continues, and she’s giggling at this point, tickled by the warmth and the wine. “I really didn’t think you’d be able to tell the difference-”

The glasses finds their places on the coffer table and Dinah’s legs are suddenly seized by two warm hands, tugging her not ungently across the couch and into Ava’s lap until the woman can loom over her, arm braced against the back of the couch and warm fingers beneath her chin.

“You decanted box wine, Dinah?” she asks, “And you thought I wouldn’t notice?”

“Maybe you didn’t? Only one of the carafes- had the box-” she’s breathless now, still giggling, enrapt in the sight of Ava above her- the green of her eyes, bright with amusement and incredulity; her hair, unbound and slipping from behind her ear; the soft, full promise of her lips. “But maybe… maybe you’ve been drinking it this entire time…”

Ava’s looking at her lips as well, now. Her gaze darkens, the hand on Dinah’s chin slipping to her cheek, the curve of her jaw. Her lips part as her gaze flicks slowly, deliberately back up to meet her own and Dinah simmers at the intent there, the heat of her gaze against the gentle way her fingers slip into her hair.

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?” Ava says, before she draws her into a kiss, licking into the warmth of her mouth and effectively stealing all her thought, breath and reason.

(but the joke is still on her, in the end: there wasn’t any box wine at all)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the wonderful prompt on Tumblr, lovely person.
> 
> I should say I am fully a supporter of boxwine, I just hc Ava as a total wine snob-


	2. Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It's in the blood._ Dinah thinks about that.

It's as simple as a cocktail party question thrown across the canapes during the major's bimonthly mixer, volleyed by his wife. Why this, detective? Why this at all?

-

(Why did you join the police?)

It’s in the blood, Farah jokes from her comfortable sprawl over the lounge chair in the living room, that afternoon they'd first broached the topic of Dinah's father. And there is an understanding in Ava’s features after she'd said it, her green eyes flicking towards her, edged with memory before the woman had turned her face away, curving out of the direct light. Something like - comprehension. As if a jumble of puzzle pieces were finally clicking into place - and that, that gets Dinah’s blood boiling, that acceptance that this is what she was, as if this is who she would ever have been-

But she stops herself before the words can leave her mouth, low and sharp.

Instead Dinah- thinks about it.

Who _was_ she now? Whose boots had she been trying to fill, if she’d wanted to fill any at all?

Not her mother’s, she thinks immediately, obviously. Her mother - is like a distant star, visible once the sun has dipped beneath the horizon, maybe, but operating under her own devices. A constant. Far enough that a smudge of the glass and- she’s gone.

(Nate is the moon. Ethereal. Unknowable - and yet known with the startling, personal intimacy of a dark night and an open window, the breath of the cold on her cheek and the chill over her arms and the moon overhead, pearlescent, eye-to-eye.

And the world is unreal, save for that held gaze. It shifts and disintegrates, a tableau dissolved in grey and white shapes.)

(And Ava is-)

The academy has not been her first choice. She’d gone to school, first; poured years into a southern city and a new life and then-

She’d come back. To her humperdinck town. The north. To rolling hills, the mild tenderness of 50 yr old suburbs surrounded by ancient woodland and mulch and the fog in the mornings, the distant, opaque eyes of the decaying factories.

She rents an apartment in one of the old town houses, takes the fast track graduate policing course at the local university and then she settles, forging new friendships, a new life.

It’s a different life than the one she’d toyed with. But it’s a decision she’d made, she’d planned for; it's a decision that ...she wonders if she'd always planned to loop back into.

She doesn't have many memories of her father, but she does have this: his badge, pressed into her grip at the ten year memorial service to a man she never knew, large hands ruffling her hair, strangers and words and sympathies she can't identify with and a photograph that her mother had hardly been able to look at. 

She doesn't really remember him at all, save for the absence, and the knowledge of what he was. It was an absence that had helped define her, but she hardly even had the shared memory. Rebecca didn't share. And so she wondered, but she'd grown up without him. She was raised by a smorgasbord of nannies and au pairs and her mother's presence, although limited, was at least consistent. There was trust there. Lines and connection that they were both familiar with. Effectively a busy single mother and a live in nanny who provided the emotional support her mother lacked. She is surprisingly well-adjusted, considering.

In the blood, though. She thinks about that.

\--

When the opportunity comes for Dinah to become a detective, she _takes it._

She’s been taking night classes for the last two years (look at her go! Woman with a plan!) in criminology and criminal science, building on her sociology foundations and the policing degree she fast tracked after her bachelors. It’s all her own merit but this is where Rebecca really stepped up - she has been there for that academic/professional support - more of a mentor than a mother. Scheduled coffee/wine outings and all.

(That’s harsh. She knows it’s harsh. They have a good relationship - but. And it’s a big but. There is a limit to the support that can be given - in absentia).

There’s a memory she has, from when she was young - infant school, she thinks, and so she’s maybe all of six or seven years old; the Christmas nativity play. It’s the late 90s and these are still a thing, particularly up north - the school is non-denominational and therefore, blanket Christian; but she remembers at least they also celebrated Hanukkah as a class and she remembers colouring in pictures of Vishnu and Shiva, names and stories she knew from home, her mother's family, and the picture books her mother gifted after long stays away. She remembers reading the books with her those rare, long evenings; stealing sips of cold coffee from Rebecca’s discarded thermos; hiding and falling asleep in Rebecca’s bedsheets with the stubbornness of a child and being carted, gently, back to her own bed. She remembers the smell of woodsmoke in her mother's blouse as much as perfume and she’d never known to question it, not then.

She remembers the nativity, beautiful disaster that it was. Not what she was dressed as, if anything, only - that she had looked out into the audience and saw her mother sat there in her work outfit, something like a smile on her face, on an afternoon she’d secured from work but wouldn’t be home for after, and that thought had just-

She’d cried mid-performance, to her classmate’s derision and teacher’s despair and once she was tugged not ungently from the stage she was scolded and seated somewhere else until the play was over and she was taken home, by the latest childminder, and that was that.

Except, maybe-

(Rebecca’s expression: The failing line of her mouth, the red about her eyes. Her mother’s arms around her shoulders afterwards, the hum of her voice as Dinah had clung to her shoulders and sobbed into her hair and she'd sung, low and quiet, just for the two of them).

Dinah wonders if it’s normal, how often her mind fall back to Rebecca. She thinks of her career and it’s her mother and the closed shoebox of her home office she remembers, the cheap pull blinds slanted against the setting sun. It’s her mother’s hands folded primly on the desk, nails neatly trimmed and painted a neutral shade of brown, and Dinah’s own in her lap, bitten to the quick but carefully relaxed, fingers curled over her thighs.

 _You’re sure?_ Rebecca had asked, her gaze penetrating and firm but still- steadying. Her eyes are lit by the glow of the fading sun; in this light they’re molten, simmering, a prairie threaded with sparks.

Dinah’s eyes are hazel, slashed with green - her father’s influence she’s told, but she hardly knows, for the few pictures they still have of him.

 _Yes_ , Dinah says, and she doesn’t look away. _I’m sure. This is what I want. This is what I want to become._

Rebecca nods, an inclination of her head, and there’s no other movement save the fluttered shadow of a bird beyond the blinds.

 _Alright_.


End file.
